Inevitabilities
by Lark28
Summary: SS face the realities of growing up... and apart? Futurefic.
1. Becoming Apart

[A/N: The first chapter of a work in progress. Reviews will motivate me to finish!]

As Summer leaned in to kiss him, the subtle scent hit her once again. Clean cotton. Ivory soap. _Boy_. She could never find quite the right words to describe the scent or explain its origin, it just was. It was home, it was safety, it was tenderness... It was Seth.

Summer pulled back for an instant, then rested her cheek on his chest, breathing him in. Another minute wouldn't hurt, would it? Just one more kiss – one more long twilight ramble down the beach – one more night. And yet, she knew she had to do it. That's how it always worked, see? Seth was the optimist, the idealist, the dreamer. Summer was in charge of realities, including the rather harsh one they'd both been ignoring all spring. College. Or rather, colleges. Plural.

Steeling herself, she pulled away from him.

-Cohen... We have to talk.

-_Talk_ talk? Like "Seth, you've done something bad, let's talk about how you're going to pay" talk? 'Cause Sum, I swear, I was just kidding about-

-Quiet, Cohen! "Talk" as in _Let me talk_, okay?

She hadn't meant to snap, but she couldn't let herself be sidetracked. She had to be the tough one tonight.

-We have to talk. About college. About this summer. About... reality. Reality is that we're 17 and about to go off to college. I love you, Cohen, but –

Seth opened his mouth to protest, then looked away, silent for once. He knew what she was doing. He wasn't stupid. Summer was always convinced he was this tender, fragile innocent she needed to shield, and there she went again, sparing him the guilt of being the bad guy.

Summer sighed, then continued.

-We said we wouldn't let each other sacrifice our college dreams. When it turned out you wanted Swarthmore and I wanted UC Davis, we joked about how it was good to be rich kids who could rack up the frequent flyer miles visiting all the time. We pretended nothing was going to change. But Seth, things always change. We could live next door to each other and it would still happen. Growing up, I mean. Who I am now... who you are now... we could be totally different people in a year. People that may not be... meant for each other. God, Cohen, I want to be meant for you. I want to wake up and be all grown up and still as completely in love with you as I am now. But I'm 17. I can't really pretend I know everything love means already. I can't promise I'll always be the same person. I don't _want_ to always be the same as I am today, and I don't want you to stay frozen either – we're so damn young and stupid and – incomplete. If we go off to college still clinging to each other, we'll never figure out how to be complete. On our own, I mean. As individuals. I love you, Cohen. But... we have to grow up.

Summer ran out of words. Knowing it was right didn't make it less utterly and completely wrong. You didn't break up with someone because you loved them, did you? Seth's stillness scared her. She reached for him and he stepped back, flinching. Gathering himself, he finally broke the silence.

-I know that you're right. I know that all the things you said are the things that make sense and the things that reasonable people would say and I hate that I know you're right and I hate that I have to agree with you and, shit, I hate this whole thing. This certainty that everything is uncertain, which doesn't make sense but neither does anything else I thought was certain, it's all certainly uncertain now and you were the one thing that always made sense and now you're uncertain too and it's all... coming apart.

-We'll figure it out, Cohen. We'll make it work. I mean – we'll still talk, right? We can be... friends.

-No.

-No? What? Cohen, this isn't like "I hate you, bye." This is – so we don't destroy it all. So we give ourselves a chance.

-Summer, I can't be just your friend. I was _never_ just your friend. Existing in your sphere and not loving you is physically impossible for me. All those things you said about having to grow up and find ourselves and be independent – you were right. But all that – it can't happen if you're still the first thought in my mind upon waking and the last as I fall asleep. I can't be around you and not be in love with you. So if I can't be in love with you...

They sat in silence. The realization that this was really it, that moment whose inevitability they'd blithely glossed over all year, settled thickly upon them, dampening their ability to react, to respond. Maybe if they just never moved or spoke again, time would stop and they could stay like this forever, together and apart, complete and incomplete, whole and broken all at once. Summer found herself holding her breath, afraid that the slighest move would send them tumbling over the edge.

_Three months later..._

Struggling to haul yet another suitcase of clothes from her car, Summer cursed the upperclassmen guys playing frisbee on the lawn. Didn't college boys know anything? The way to impress hot freshman chicks was to carry their stuff, not to run around shirtless showing off your abs. Hi, it's California, being hot doesn't make you special. Fetching me an iced mocha to sip while you unload my car? _That_ will get you a date. Of course, Cohen would just have whined about how heavy lifting was really more Ryan's specialty, and –

Summer caught herself. Cohen... wasn't supposed to be her standard of reference any more. This was college, and those frisbee jocks were the future, not Seth. Okay, ewww, maybe not those exact guys, but that wasn't the point. It had taken her all summer to train herself to ignore the million thoughts and memories of him that populated her brain, and she was done mourning. Shaking the memory away, she dropped the suitcase and assumed her trademark stance, planting her hands on her hips.

-You! Blue-shirt boy! Drop the frisbee and be a man! Carry my stuff without breaking anything and I just might let you take me to dinner.

Stunned but dazzled, the boy complied, quickly imitated by three hopeful-looking friends. Bring on college, Summer smiled.

[As you may infer from the title, yes, we will see Seth again...]


	2. She Gave Me a Pen

[A/N: Second in a series of vignettes]

Swarthmore. Fall 2005.

Chicks made no sense. Strike that, _women_ made no sense. Seth had learned from experience that his female classmates did not take kindly to being called "chicks." Damn liberal-artsy Easterners. But then, that was the point, wasn't it? Explore new places, meet new people, learn new ways to piss off girls? Whoops, another dangerous word. Best to move on quickly, back on track, back to the topic, which was... what again? Oh, yeah – chicks not making sense. Seth had expected the East Coast crowd to better appreciate his quirky-emo-geeksexy charms than the kids back home, but apparently dorky was dorky no matter the time zones. Which he still didn't get, by the way. Sure, he got the whole Earth spinning, different parts illuminated at different times, today in New York is tomorrow in Tokyo, scientific crap – I mean, he did get into Swarthmore, and not because Caleb built them a library or anything – but why couldn't Philly and Berkeley watch the _Simpsons_ at the same time? How were he and Ryan supposed to do that brotherly bonding thing? Sure, he could TiVo the Eastern Standard Time, and then wait for the Pacific Standard Time to call Ryan and watch together, but you could never trust Ryan to be free these days, what with all this "studying" he claimed was involved in going to college. So technically it wasn't really the time zones holding up the bonding thing, but... Again with the off-topic. Focus. Chicks. Lack of sense. Making him crazy. Right. So Monday, he'd met this cute girl in the laundry room. Maybe it was the detergent fumes, but he was pretty sure Laurie was falling fast for the funny. Google-stalking revealed she'd won some painting competitions in high school, so he thought he'd impress her by inviting her to an exhibition at the campus museum. Seth Cohen: Sensitive Art Lover. So smooth. And yet so single – what was with that? One of the artist's abstract collages hung in his parents' living room, and he'd regaled Laurie with tales of how the random shapes seemed to become eyes under certain lighting, and whenever he and Summer would make out on the couch she'd become convinced they were being watched, which was really a very Summer thing to think, because Summer always expected everyone to pay attention to her, but not in that self-centered kind of way, just, you know, she liked to feel appreciated, which is totally normal when you consider how little attention she got from her parents –

Ah. Shit. Yeah, that was probably why Laurie wandered away "to get a drink" and never came back. Another thing Seth had learned about girls – sorry, _women_ – is that they didn't like hearing stories about your girlfriend. Again with the slippage – EX-girlfriend. Very much ex. This-is-for-our-own-good ex. Seventeen-year-olds-shouldn't-pretend-they-can-make-forever-commitments ex. Go-off-and-be-your-own-person ex. That all made sense intellectually, but it turns out it's not actually that simple to forget about the girl you loved from afar for a decade and from blissful nearness for over a year. Go figure. This had to stop, though. If the whole point was to free themselves to grow up, thinking about Summer every hour of the day was probably counterproductive.

Glancing around the room to make sure his roommate Keith wasn't around, Seth pulled a battered Vans box from under his bed. Only Seth would have kept the box from his first-ever pair of Vans, and only Seth would now consider it an appropriately sacred Summer Box. It contained the only reminders he'd allowed himself to bring East – a few pictures, some ticket stubs, an amusingly raunchy note passed in English class, and that damned pen. "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen," Seth mumbled to himself, channeling Lloyd Dobbler. Summer loved that movie. A week before he left for college, Summer had turned up at Seth's door, the first time he'd seen her since the awful night of the breakup, and handed him a pen. Not even some fancy gold-nibbed fountain pen, or even a nice smooth trackball, just one of those old-skool four-color Bic pens. The ones that totally fascinated him all through grade school, when he'd take them apart and switch the inks around to confuse people and then turn the barrels into spitball-shooters so accurate he'd once hit Luke square in the nose after watching him taunt Summer for bringing her My Little Ponies to school – okay, so maybe it wasn't a totally random present. Maybe he was supposed to appreciate that she remembered, or appreciate that she saw him as her Lloyd, or whatever, but it was still just a dumb pen. And now, of course, it was irrevocably Summer's Pen. Only to be used for writing about Summer or to Summer. He did a lot of that, actually, it's just that none of the letters made it out of the room. The Vans box contained at least a dozen of them, neatly tucked into dated envelopes and sealed, never to be read, secret outpourings of Seth's struggle to move on.

Seth reached for a clean sheet of paper and began to write. He hardly ever wrote longhand anymore, but somehow it just felt right on this occasion.

_Summer,_

_I can't do this anymore. I pretend I've moved on, I pretend I'm all cool and over you and ready for whatever life throws at me next, but the truth is, I'm waiting. Waiting for this breakup to be over, waiting for the distance to disappear, waiting to be all grown up so I can say things like "Marry me" and not sound like a fool. I can't wait, though. If I wait, that says I assume we're meant to be, and if I just assume that, how can I possibly let myself live and grow up and actually **find out** what or who is meant for me? I have to let you go. I knew that from the start, I just didn't understand what it really meant. It's not just saying we're breaking up, saying we're going to date other people, saying we won't see each other for years... it's actually letting go of all the hopes and dreams and plans. It means accepting that you might fall in love, really in love, forever in love, with someone else. It means accepting that we might one day look at each other and feel nothing at all._

_I can't do any of that if every time I hit a bump in the Get Over Summer road I pull out this box and allow myself to wallow in the memories and pour my heart out to you in these stupid letters. It's so fake. I'm not writing to you, I'm writing to this image of  you in my head and sometimes I wonder how much of that image is just my own invention. Even if it isn't invention, it's still based on the old Summer, the one I knew in high school. Who knows who you are now, who you'll be in a year, five years, ten years? And that's the whole point – to find out who we become without knowing who the other is becoming._

_So, I'm saying goodbye. Really goodbye. I loved you, probably more than I ever managed to express, but now it's time to close that book and put it away instead of obsessively re-reading it, wondering when the sequel will come out. No more waiting._

Seth 

Seth folded up the letter, sealed it, and dated it. October 28th, 2005. For good measure, he tucked Captain Oats into the box along with the letter and the pen, then shoved the box far under his bed. Enough of this pathetic whiny writing – he was starting to sound like one of those fanfics Marissa wrote, with long sappy monologues from Dawson about Joey being his sooooouuuuulmaaaaaaaaaate, blah blah boringcakes. Not that Seth saw himself as a Dawson, of course. He was totally a Pacey, because chicks dig the sexy way more than the whiny, and this adorkable loser was about to take Swarthmore by storm. Just as soon as he stopped referencing stupid teen soap operas, of course, because ewww, that was so Summer, and Seth was so over her. Officially.


End file.
